It's Friday and I must be missing the obvious with this one. I have a board design that only has tracks on the bottom layer, but the component pads are multilayer.

How can I change all of the pads to be bottom layer only? Editing them pad by pad works, but using "find similar objects" (object kind: pad: same) and editing them globally sees the pads disappear totally!

1) Shift select all the pads to change and double click on the last one (or you can use the find similar objects method if you want.)

2) You should now have the PCB inspector window showing so you can update all selected components at once.

3) Change the 'Stack mode' to 'top-middle-bottom'

4) Set the layers you don't want pads to zero. (eg, if you want only a bottom pad set middle and top layers to zero x and zero y)

5) Untick 'plated'

Done.

You maybe falling into the trap of trying to change the layer from "multilayer" to "bottom layer" on pads which have holes. (Altium doesn't like that. If it has a hole then it has to be multilayer since the hole is on both sides)

You can Shift Select every pad and doubleclick the last one.Or use the find similar objects tool

Either should work.

But you must only have pads selected. If any other components are selected then options will disappear from the list.

You can also get issues when you have pads selected that have different options enabled.

For example, if pad A has an option disabled and that option would bring up other options if it was enabled then you may not get those options if you multiselect it together with other pads that have it enabled already.

(You may have to first unlock the primitives if you're trying to do pads that are part of existing components).

OK, I was actually getting the right result but since the pads are still "multilayer", the rendering in 2D mode didn't change. I had a look in 3D mode and sure enough the top pads, etc are gone. Thanks guys.